In a Sped-Up World, It’s Becoming a Luxury To Slow Down
Who actually has time to be a human anymore?
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I recently came across a YouTube shopping haul from circa 2010, reuploaded on its hyperactive younger sibling, TikTok. One of the most liked comments on the clip was, ‘I can’t believe we used to think these videos were fast-paced.’
The video is actually relatively fast-paced, but, of course, if you compare it to the 15-second day-in-the-life TikToks or those even shorter clips that string together a rapid-fire sequence of images — each one barely lingering long enough for you to process what’s there — it might seem slow.
The average video length on TikTok today is between 35–55 seconds. Just a few years ago, in 2017, the average YouTube video was around 15 minutes long. Today, it’s a little over 11 minutes. YouTube now even has a dedicated section for videos up to one minute long called YouTube Shorts.
It does seem like everything has sped up recently, doesn’t it? There are countless apps and websites that distil entire books into bite-sized reads you can consume in a matter of minutes. There’s a whole genre of sped-up versions of popular songs that social media and Spotify are now full of. Even TV shows, ads and movie scenes are becoming shorter. Couple all that with ultra-fast fashion brands churning out new styles practically every hour of every day or same-day delivery services, shrinking days of waiting into mere hours, and, well, the conclusion is clear.
So much of the modern world is rushed, sped up, bite-sized, and delivered straight to our impatient neurons on a golden platter of instant gratification, leaving little room for reflection or depth.
Perhaps that’s just what we want.
But even if it is, why is that? And is it a good thing?
When my partner mentioned he needed to visit his hometown, Milan, for a few days in August, and I asked to come along, he warned me that it’s always a ghost town this time of the year. And indeed, it is.
Most restaurants, shops, bakeries, and other businesses are closed for the entire month. And apart from a few tourist hotspots — like the cathedral of Milan, Duomo, or the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, also dedicated to worship, although of a different kind — you won’t find many people around. The streets in residential areas are as empty during the day as they are in the middle of the night.
In Italy, like in many other parts of Europe, most workers take August off. This phenomenon, which some refer to as ‘Euro Laziness,’ dates back to the early 20th century, specifically the interwar period. As historian Gary Cross explains:
The holiday-with-pay reflected a consensus that modern world required compensatory leisure in the form of extended periods of time to ‘recover’ lost values of family and community.
However, this isn’t the case everywhere. The stillness of Milan in August stands in stark contrast to the constant busyness of London, where we live. Here, time never seems to slow down. Even now, most of my friends and acquaintances continue working, perhaps with only a short break planned for the bank holiday at the end of the month.
There’s also hardly an equivalent to ‘Euro Laziness’ in most places around the world, including across the pond. A few days before leaving for Italy, I asked my brother — who’s been living in the US for most of the past two decades — if he planned on taking a break this summer. As usual, his response was ‘no.’ I often feel like I’ve ‘lost’ my brother to a culture of overwork. He doesn’t even agree with it. He just doesn’t have much of a choice.
It’s preposterous that one of the world’s wealthiest countries doesn’t legally require employers to provide employees with paid vacation, forcing millions of Americans to work for years without a break. But although most countries globally do mandate paid vacation days, whether people actually take them and can enjoy — and afford to enjoy — quality holiday time is another matter entirely.
According to a report published this June by Expedia, nearly two in three workers around the world are ‘vacation deprived’, with Gen Z being hit hardest among all generations. In the UK, while only 38% of Baby Boomers feel they don’t have enough vacation time, 70% of Britain’s youngest workers claim to be deprived of enough time off. Even in France, where vacationing is practically a national sport, young employees face similar challenges. The report also found that Americans are now ‘more vacation deprived than ever,’ with a majority (53%) not planning to use the little time off they do have, citing ‘life being too busy’ as one of the reasons why.
Leisure time has been on the decline lately as well. Data from the OECD shows that the average time people spend on leisure has decreased since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the number of people experiencing ‘time poverty’ — those whose leisure and restorative activities are less than 60% of the median — has risen significantly since 2000. Unsurprisingly, OECD data also shows that men’s average leisure time is higher than women’s, driven by the unpaid domestic and care labour we’re still expected to shoulder disproportionately.
Even our scant leisure time tends to be ‘leaky,’ as Derek Thompson describes it, due to increasingly blurred work-play boundaries. This is also evident in a recently identified psychological phenomenon called ‘bedtime procrastination,’ which is delaying sleep to squeeze in leisure activities we didn’t have time for during the day.
It’s clearly not just a perception problem.
We are stretched for time, especially time for proper rest.
But something else is taking place alongside this shift, too.
Ever since I read David Cain’s essay Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed, this quote has been stuck in my head:
But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (…) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
When I posted it over a week ago, it resonated with quite a lot of people. And not surprisingly so. At this point, many of us noticed, or at least started to notice, that the 40-hour (or more) workweek, which remains the global norm, leaves very little time for life itself — especially if you commute, live alone or with another full-time working partner, and have children. On the other hand, those who, like me, have left full-time employment to pursue freelance work often find that the freedom to work less and, as a result, have more free time, even at the cost of earning less, at least allows us to cut back on expenses we once considered necessities.
Apart from higher spending and excessive consumerism, the scarcity of free time in today’s society together with the culture of haste and productivity also make us feel like the little time we have for ourselves needs to be ‘maximised.’ This is what economists have started to call ‘the intensification of the value of our leisure time.’
If we only get fleeting moments of downtime, snatched between the demands of our over-scheduled lives, it’s tempting to want to fill them with as much as possible. And while scrolling through an endless stream of hyper-sped-up entertainment or shiny new products and one ‘micro-trend’ after another certainly doesn’t count as a ‘productive’ use of our time, it can feel like it. After all, we’re ‘consuming’ so much in so little time.
But can we even process all that we see, hear, or read?
Does this actually help us relax and enrich our lives or leave us craving more, constantly feeling like something is missing?
I’ve previously written about the evidence that information overload can lead to emotional exhaustion, burnout, poor decision-making, as well as change in cognitive performance, sometimes significant. Besides, so many things we consume are of increasingly low quality, a trend likely to worsen with the rise of AI-generated content.
It also goes without saying that never setting aside time to slow down properly — or simply being unable to — will eventually catch up with us and take its toll. As the wealth of research shows, prioritising high-quality rest and taking frequent time off — not just once a year — is not a luxury but a necessity for maintaining overall mental, emotional and physical well-being.
Yet, it is becoming a luxury, isn’t it?
Transatlantic crossings used to take over 60 days in the 17th century. Sending letters through pigeon messengers or by horseback took slightly less time but still required at least a few days or weeks in some cases.
It’s probably hard for most of us to imagine a world where travelling to another continent took months or where communication required days or even weeks. Technological advances have removed or minimised distance and time in virtually every aspect of human life, allowing things, people, and information to flow together on an unprecedented scale. We’ve gained much in this process, but there are downsides, too.
Living in a 24/7 world where everything happens at breakneck speed and without points to stop and start doesn’t exactly seem conducive to lingering and appreciating the brief existence on this giant piece of rock.
But isn’t that what makes humans human?
For much of history, particularly before the Industrial Revolution, humans likely devoted most of their time to leisure. To doing what they loved. To being creative. To connecting with one another. To lingering.
The frenetic pace of modern life isn’t just historically unique; it turns us into rather historically unique humans who rarely, if ever, slow down and rush through things that perhaps shouldn’t be rushed at all. Is it really better to skim through summaries of dozens of books or to immerse yourself in one, cover to cover? To scroll endlessly through a visual rollercoaster of social media rather than take a walk in the park or meet a friend for a cup of tea?
When you’re speeding down the road, everything outside blurs into a jumble of colours and shapes, impossible to distinguish from one another. It’s only when you slow down that their details come into focus, and you can start to notice and appreciate what’s around you.
It’s not a mystery, though, why so many of us might find it easier to just go with whatever our fast-paced reality is nudging us to do instead and why we feel increasingly vacation-deprived and time-deprived and burned out. All the technological advances once expected to reduce the workweek to as little as 15 hours, as economist John Maynard Keynes predicted, haven’t exactly led to more leisure time for most people. If anything, modern technology, coupled with the absurdity of the ‘hustle and grind’ culture and capitalism’s relentless push for growth, has made slowing down feel wrong or impossible or both.
Unfortunately, keeping free time scarce also means that many of us lack the mental energy and will to understand why this is happening in the first place and how we can change it.
But we must do our best not to forget what makes life worth living.
It’s certainly not just trying to survive another day.
Recognising that the world pressures us to keep moving faster and faster is just the first step. Stepping off this speeding carousel is a different challenge altogether. For most of us, the latter is sadly difficult without systemic changes, such as shorter workweeks and sufficient paid time off.
Leisure time and rest really shouldn’t be considered a privilege or luxury.
They’re essential human rights.
Leisure time is even greater when it's synchronized with the leisure time of people in your life. That's why public holidays, weekend off, or conventions like summer holiday are so important
I retired last year, so in a way, I am on a “permanent vacation.” I love it. And it’s crazy how sped up the media is getting. Marshall McLuhan predicted it in the 1960s, but it’s difficult to live thru. Thanks for calling attention to it all.